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Climate change, along with rapid urbanisation and deforestation, turbocharged floods in Nepal that killed more than 240 people last month, scientists said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Nepal suffered its worst flooding in decades in late September after ferocious monsoon rains swelled rivers, swamping entire neighbourhoods in the capital Kathmandu and other districts.<\/p>\n
World Weather Attribution (WWA), a network of scientists who assess the role of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events, said the link between the intense rainfall and a warming planet was clear.<\/p>\n
“If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with fossil fuel emissions, these floods would have been less intense, less destructive and less deadly,” said researcher Mariam Zachariah, from Imperial College London.<\/p>\n
Their analysis found the relentless rain, which fell on saturated ground in the late monsoon, was made at least 10 percent heavier and 70 percent more likely by climate change.<\/p>\n
They warned that such “explosive” rain bursts will “become even heavier, risking more destructive floods” if the world does not stop burning fossil fuels.<\/p>\n
Lashing rain from September 26 sparked floods and landslides that killed 246 people and left 18 missing, according to Nepal’s government.<\/p>\n
WWA, which uses modelling to compare weather patterns in our world and one without human-induced climate change, said there was a high level of uncertainty in the results because of the complex rain dynamics in the small, mountainous region affected.<\/p>\n
However, the results were in line with growing scientific evidence on large-scale extreme rain in a warming climate, in which the atmosphere holds more water.<\/p>\n
The role of climate change was also compounded by other man-made problems, they said, including rapid urbanisation, with a nearly four-fold increase in built-up areas in Kathmandu since 1990.<\/p>\n
That was coupled with major deforestation that disrupted the natural flow of water, with tree cover slashed by more than a quarter since 1989.<\/p>\n
The floods smashed hydropower plants, washed away homes and ripped away bridges. It was the latest disastrous flood to hit the Himalayan nation this year.<\/p>\n
“Climate change is no longer a distant threat,” said Roshan Jha, Researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai.<\/p>\n
“With every fraction of a degree of warming, the atmosphere can potentially hold more moisture, leading to much heavier downpours, and catastrophic floods like these.”<\/p>\n
Nepal has embarked on a giant hydropower dam building spree, generating 99 percent of its power, with output increasing fourfold in the past eight years.<\/p>\n
It has signed deals to export surplus power to neighbouring coal-dependent India.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said that increasingly intense floods and droughts are a “distress signal” of what is to come as climate change makes the planet’s water cycle ever more unpredictable.<\/p>\n
WMO chief Celeste Saulo called water the “canary in the coal mine of climate change”.<\/p>\n
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